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Category Archives: predictions

You’ve all heard the news last week (at least, I think you did): On September 7 the huge merger between Dell and EMC took place, making the Dell Technologies transaction the biggest technology company integration in history! So the digital transformation is really here, and Dell Technologies / Dell EMC is leading the way. From October 18 to 20, Dell EMC will host business and IT leaders from around the world for the biggest enterprise technology event of the year, Dell EMC World 2016 in Austin, Texas. And I received an invite to join the EMC Elect and Dell Rock Stars to report on the news that Michael Dell and others will bring us. Many thanks go to Mark Browne, who made sure EMC Elect people were invited to be present at this event. We’ll be in super secret influencer meetings, sneak peek preview breakfasts and we’ll be sitting in a reserved seat section to watch Michael Dell perform on stage! Yeah, I’m pretty excited! After being invited to the VNX2 launch in Milan in 2013, I’m once again present at a major event as part of the EMC Elect.

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Will this be the last EMC World ever? I can’t imagine that.

Some say this year will be the final EMC World. Ever. But then again, there might not be another Dell world either. Not in this format anyway. Will EMC World continue in another format, or will it be called DEll/EMC World? Maybe EMC/Dell World? Or just World? No, that doesn’t make sense at all.

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Internet Of Things, the IoT

We’ve all heard the hype about the IoT, the Internet Of Things, but is it really a hype? Back in the dark ages (the 90s), a company called Novell already claimed that coffee machines and refrigerators would be equipped with a mini OS and an IP address, so automatic ordering systems could make sure you always have specific foods (or beer) in your fridge.

But at the same time the world was running low on IP addresses, so actually providing all these electronic devices with a unique address was a challenge. The solution was IPv6 which provides a few more addresses than IPv4 does.

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It’s been a few weeks now since Mr Dell, Silver Lake and MSD Partners announced they want to take over EMC and with that become the world’s largest privately held IT company. For me I relived the whole HP / Compaq merger and at that time Compaq was my favorite company. My whole world collapsed. What was going to happen to the world I lived in? It was going to disappear! But luckily it did not. The best pieces of Compaq at the time, their servers, were simply rebranded and sold as HP Proliants and the Alpha CPU “suddenly” appeared as the Itanium from Intel. And everybody was happy. Well, sort of. At least the server department kept on delivering what they were famous for.

And now this happened

I never realized Michael Dell was even in a position to actually raise that kind of money. But with help from Silver Lake and MSD Partners he succeeded to raise sixty five Billion US Dollars! Just imagine! Oh, wouldn’t I like to get my hands on a small portion of that!! But that’s a whole other story. Forget the money, forget the stock exchange market: what will this mean for both companies and the people working there? As some of you know, I’m involved with both the EMC education department as well as the customer facing piece of EMC Support and I want to share my thoughts on the future of my current “Compaq” equivalent, aka “EMC”.

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According to rumors Western Digital would love to buy SanDisk for $19B. Multiple companies are interested in buying SanDisk, but it’s WD that seems to have the advantage. The deal will perhaps already take place during next week!

Micron also interested

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HP and SanDisk are making revolutionary memory market ready

The IT companies HP and SanDisk are promising that their Storage Class Memory (SCM) will be 1000 times as fast as the current generation of flash memory. That’s quite an assumption or is it really proven that it will be this fast.

Storage Class Memory (SCM) is a combination of the memristor technology HP is working on for years already and SanDisk’s ReRAM technology. The new type of memory has some pretty impressive characteristics:

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It’s that time of the year again: EMC World in Las Vegas, which takes place from May 4 to May 7. And this year I’m not going unprepared again. So I made a list of do’s and don’ts, so I can more easily pick the best way to spend my precious time. Are YOU going too?

So what’s my week about?

When I arrive in Vegas after having 2 layovers in London and Dallas, I’m probably half asleep. Because of the 9 hour time difference I’m sure I will sleep at very odd hours and be awake at even worse hours. I just hope I’m not sleepwalking through the casino, since I don’t even like gambling. Although it would be funny to wake up, finding out that I’ve won a few grand, right? My stay in Sin City will start with a packed two days filled with meetings. Yes: working on the Saturday and Sunday: it’s all part of the game! And that day I already have a meeting conflict, but the week will have plenty of opportunity to catch up with old friends, so I’m not worried there.

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Warning: SPOILER ALERT! This infographic contains details about the new space film “Interstellar.”

The film “Interstellar” relies on real science for many of its stunning visuals. Physicist Kip Thorne, an expert on black holes and wormholes, provided the math that the special effects artists turned into movie magic.

The spaceship Endurance’s destination is Gargantua, a fictional supermassive black hole with a mass 100 million times that of the sun. It lies 10 billion light-years from Earth and is orbited by several planets. Gargantua rotates at an astounding 99.8 percent of the speed of light.

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It’s that time of the year again: EMC World

15 Thousand nerds gathering in Las Vegas for the yearly week of EMC propaganda. That’s what a lot of people might think it is anyway. It’s the 2014th edition… that doesn’t sound right. Ehm, oh well, you get my drift. Well, maybe it is nerd-week, but hey: every vendor who thinks they’re the best in something is doing this sort of events and besides that, it’s a great event to meet people you haven’t seen in a year or so.

Social networking in real life

Social networking, gathering knowledge of things to come, looking for solutions to challenges you already have in your normal day jobs, looking for insights in things on your wish list. Bacon, unicorns, hardware and a loooot of “software”, since that’s the trend since a few years. No matter how you explain it:

IT is in Las Vegas, baby!

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George Symons, Gridstore

Gridstore as a storage company is obviously focussing on SDS. Virtualization has changed the way storage vendors need to look at their storage solutions, because their storage now needs to react on how applications work to be able to provide an optimal performance. And of course cost. How customers want their storage solutions is about cost. It needs to be cheaper, perform better and provide more insight in what the data is actually doing there.

Virtualization changes everything and nothing

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Kelly Herrell, Brocade

Kelly takes us back to 2013 and the software defined anything. Was it really there? Was anything real that year? In 2013 the real work on the Software Defined Network concept started!

In 2013 SDN started

Last year it was about how the world’s largest customers, the largest buyers, demanding the vendors to come up with a software defined product that works for them. The message was clearly that the industry wasn’t yet giving customers what they actually needed. Remember that the customers define what vendors should target for, not the other way around!

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Thomas Cornely, Nexenta

IDC reveled a new report they did with EMC: In the digital universe today only 5% of the currently available data (4.4 Trillion GB) is analyzed. Imagine that in 2020 we have 10 times as much data! That’s 44 Trillion GB of data, people! How much is 1 Trillion GB? That’s a 1 followed by 12 zeroes…. Gigabytes, that is: 12 Trillion GB! Where does all this data come from? It’s the internet of things, like sensor data, meta data, but also the vast amount of data that people create these days. Think about what people do all day on their mobile devices using social media, higher resolution personal data like photos, but also more of this high-resolution data. You can imagine that the digital universe is exploding! And again: only 5% of that data is being analyzed today. Imagine what that means in the year 2020! This is what’s called big data: analyzing the vast amount of data so it becomes useful.

Generate, store, analyze, get value out of it

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Windows XP patches on the black market?

Despite what several reports say, Windows XP is still an operating system that is widely used, all over the world. And now that Microsoft has stopped its official (and free) support of this succesful OS, a lot of people find themselves in need of a scarce good: XP patches. So what happens when you need a scarce good: a black market!

An official date for the first black market is already known: May 13, 2014, since that would be the first day the formerly regular patch distribution will be no longer be initiated for Windows XP.

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SDDC 2014 – Software Defined Data Center

Stephen Foskett opens the symposium by welcoming this he guests and crew. It’s the 3rd Software Defined Data Center symposium and the number of people attending is quite good. The goal of this symposium is to find out what SDDC is in reality. The day schedule looks good with various companies sharing their thoughts.

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Tech Field Day plans SDDC Symposium

Being part of the SFD5 gang I was invited to join the Software-Defined Datacenter Symposium as well! This event will feature many key figures from the industry and end-user community, and will include discussions of OpenFlow, software-defined networking (SDN), software-defined storage, converged infrastructure, and the greater software-defined future!

Note that the event capacity is severely constrained. Therefore, the SDDC Symposium is focusing on end-user implementors and encouraging others to participate online by viewing the live video stream on this page!

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A Dutch invention will change the WiFi world drastically

At least, that’s what Roel Pieper and Marcel Boekhoorn are convinced of. The revolutionary super antenna should cause all problems concerning the reach of indoor WiFi signals to disappear. Furthermore this new product is supposed to make an end to wireless antennas interfering with each other’s frequencies and smartphones will get a better reception because of this new invention. The new antenna should be better and more advanced than anything else currently known to mankind. On average a smart phone needs about seven different antennas, but with the new invention only a single one is needed. And on top of this using the new antenna more data can be sent and received compared to the existing ones.

Mathematical super-formula

Boekhoorn and Pieper worked together in a company called “Antenna Company”, which will produce these next-gen antennas. The technique is based on a mathematical super-formula made up by Professor Gielis and it’s called the “Super-formula“.

Roel Pieper is appointed as the CEO of the “Antenna Company” and they’re already talking to various multinationals about applying the antenna in cell phones, cars and routers according to the Dutch newspaper “de Telegraaf”. Other applications could be airplanes, medical equipment, weaponry and radar systems, but other equipment that needs to communicate with other equipment, such as central heating thermostats.

World hit

Antenna Company “promises to be my most successful company ever”, according to Boekhoorn in an exclusive interview by Quote. The 3D-optimized antenna can potentially make billions of Euros. “This super antenna will be a hit.” HTC, LG and Samsung are potential customers according to the billionaire. The Antenna Company is already talking to several of these multinationals. Even Cisco is supposedly interested.

High Tech Campus

Production of these super-antennas will start in March. The Antenna Company will settle at the High Tech Campus in Eindhoven in the Netherlands. The Head Quarters is formally located on Curacao. Exactly how much Boekhoorn has invested in the project, he’s unwilling to say..

Source: http://www.it-infra.nl/default.aspx?page=7364

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Storage growth

Most of the data we collect and store on our computers eventually ends up in some sort of archive. I think we can all agree on that, right? Do we ever throw anything away? Well, some data doesn’t really make sense after a while and can (and will) be deleted, but a lot of data “might be useful” after some time and so we keep it. And don’t forget the tons of digital memories we create using photo and video cameras! I estimate that I’m creating about 100 GB of digital photos and videos throughout the year and that’s increasing every year as well with the new cameras we’re using. More pixels, DSLR cameras, RAW photography and HD or even 4k HD videos are probably taking up most of the space we need extra each year.

Where do we store our data?

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Twitter, Facebook, Google+… it’s all over the (social) news

Wednesday September 11 it was all over the news: all my popular news resources mentioned in one way or the other that Cisco is now into storage. The “Software Defined Data Center” buzz word is “buzzing” since the beginning of 2013, at least I didn’t hear much of it before that.

Many companies (including my employer Open Line Consultancy with Storage As A Service and Backup As A Service) already do business this way for years, it’s just that all of a sudden it has a popular name that everybody’s using since this year. But thinking about clouds with automated processes to fine tune and schedule every wish for storage, cpu or memory has really become popular. And with Cisco now acquiring Whiptail, this vendor will now be able to participate in this rising market space.

EMC VFCache is transformed into ExtremSF and faster and larger products will be made available. Also the XtremSW software suite is introduced that eventually is able to use third party flash card to be used as cache or DAS storage

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Disclaimer

My tweets are my own, my blog is my own. The posts found here reflect my personal opinions.
The published content is not approved or even read in advance by any vendor and does not necessarily reflect opinions of this vendor. This is my blog, not a vendor blog.